SCIENCE AND TECH

WHAT GENETIC TESTING CAN DO





What is genetic testing? What is It is a test that identifies changes in chromosomes, genes, or proteins The test can confirm or rule out a suspected genetic condition or help determine a person's chance of Its uses Genetic testing can...
Give a diagnosis if someone has symptoms, say in case of drugresistant tuberculosis Show whether a person is a carrier for a genetic disease. Carriers have an altered gene, but will not get the disease. However, they can pass the altered gene on to their children Help expectant parents know whether an unborn child will have a genetic condition.
This is called prenatal testing Screen newborn infants for abnormal or missing proteins that can cause disease. This is called newborn screening Show whether a person has an inherited disposition to a certain disease before symptoms start Determine the type or dose best for a person. This is called pharmacogenetics developing or passing on a genetic disorder More than 1,000 genetic tests currently in use A test result that can show that a known alteration causing disease is not present in a person can provide a sense of relief The costs The genome sequence for public use was available from 2011, with some tests costing over `50,000. The cost has come down to almost half now The drawback Doctors say all is still not known about the genome or the proteome (the sequences of proteins that make up a single DNA strand)

A sat to net space debris, remove it from Earth's orbit

London





A new European mission aims to rendezvous a satellite with hazardous space debris and render it harmless by netting it like fish.The European Space Agency (ESA)'s ambitious mission called e.DeOrbit would use a satellite to net space debris and remove it from low Earth orbit.
The agency's Clean Space initiative is studying the e.DeOrbit mission for removing all the space debris, aiming to reduce the environmental impact of the space industry on earth and space alike.
“Launches have left earth surrounded by a halo of space junk: more than 17,000 trackable objects larger than a coffee cup, which threaten working missions with catastrophic collision. Even a 1cm nut could hit with the force of a hand grenade,“ ESA said.
The only way to control the debris across low orbits is to remove large items like derelict satellites and launcher upper stages.
The e.DeOrbit is designed to target debris items in well-trafficked polar orbits, between 800km to 1000km altitude. PTI Supernova created in lab For the first time, a massive supernova has been created inside a lab. An international team led by Oxford University scientists used laser beams, 60,000 billion times more powerful than a laser pointer, to recreate scaled supernova explosions in the lab as a way of investigating one of the most energetic events in the universe. Supernova blasts, triggered when fuel in a star reignites or its core collapses, launch a shock wave that sweeps through a few light years from the exploding star in just a few hundred years.

Supernova recreated in lab

Scientists have used laser beams 60,000 billion times more powerful than a laser pointer to recreate scaled supernova explosions in the laboratory to investigate one of the most energetic events in the universe.

Supernova explosions, triggered when the fuel within a star reignites or its core collapses, launch shock waves that sweep through a few light years of space.

“It may sound surprising that a table-top laboratory experiment that fits inside an average room can be used to study astrophysical objects that are light years across,” said Professor Gianluca Gregori of Oxford’s Department of Physics.

“In reality, the laws of physics are the same everywhere, and physical processes can be scaled from one to the other in the same way that waves in a bucket are comparable to waves in the ocean. So our experiments can complement observations of events such as the Cassiopeia A supernova explosion,” said Gregori, who led the study.

The Cassiopeia A supernova explosion was first spotted about 300 years ago in the Cassiopeia constellation 11,000 light years away, its light having taken that long to reach us.

The optical images of the explosion show irregular ‘knotty’ features and associated with these are intense radio and X-ray emissions.

Whilst no one is sure what creates these phenomena one possibility is that the blast passes through a region of space that is filled with dense clumps or clouds of gas.

“Our team began by focusing three laser beams onto a carbon rod target, not much thicker than a strand of hair, in a low density gas-filled chamber,” said Jena Meinecke, an Oxford graduate student who headed the experiment.

The heat generated was more than a few million degrees Celsius and caused the rod to explode. The dense gas clumps that surround an exploding star were simulated by introducing a plastic grid to disturb the shock front.

“The experiment demonstrated that as the blast of the explosion passes through the grid it becomes irregular and turbulent just like the images from Cassiopeia,” said Gregori.

Astra successfully test-fired from Sukhoi

Marking an important milestone, for the first time an Indian missile, Astra, was successfully test-fired from a fighter aircraft — the Sukhoi-30 MKI — from a naval range in the Western Sector on Sunday.

The test-firing met all the mission objectives and the air-launch was captured by side and forward looking high-speed cameras and the separation was exactly as per simulation, according to a press release from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

Astra is India's first Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air missile and has been designed and developed indigenously by the DRDO. The 60-km plus range missile possesses high Single Shot Kill Probability (SSKP) making it highly reliable.

Astra is an all-weather missile with active radar terminal guidance, excellent ECCM (electronic counter-counter measures) features, smokeless propulsion and process improved effectiveness in multi-target scenario, making it a highly advanced state-of-the-art missile, the release added.

Congratulating the team, Avinash Chander, Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister and DG, DRDO, observed that the launch was a major step in missile aircraft integration. He said this would be followed by launch against actual target shortly. “Many more trials are planned and will be conducted to clear the launch envelope. Weapon integration with 'Tejas', Light Combat Aircraft will also be done in the near future”, he added.

V.G. Sekaran, Director-General (Missiles and Strategic Systems), who chaired the Flight Readiness Review Committee, described it as one of the proud moments for DRDO and the entire country. Dr.K. Tamilmani, Director-General (Aeronautics), who oversaw the entire flight safety in the program, said the quality of integration and performance was high standards. This was the beginning of the phase for demonstration of launch over a wide air-launch envelope.

Director, DRDL, S. Som, said “it is a first of its kind and a good achievement”.

Astra's project director, S. Venugopal said the missile was comparable with the best in the world. He said that to completely clear the launch envelope about 20-30 trials would be carried out in a continuous fashion. The air-launch envelope would cover various aspects including altitude, speed and the angle of attack. He said Sunday's test-firing from Su-30 MKI was preceded by several weapon integration trials conducted between November 2013 and February this year. The missile underwent rigorous testing on Su-30 in captive mode for avionics integration and seeker evaluation.

He said the Mk-II variant of Astra with a range of 100 km is planned to be tested by this year end.

He said the air launch was the culmination of effort by a dedicated team from the Missile Complex, Hyderabad, EMILAC (Centre for Military Airworthiness and Certification) and the IAF. HAL carried out modifications in Su-30 along with IAF specialists, while many Indian industries played an important role in the production of reliable avionics, propulsion system, materials, air-frame and software passing stringent airworthiness requirements for the missile.

The “landmark” stem cell paper may be retracted

One of the authors is eager to have the paper withdrawn from the journal

The landmark studies on “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency” (STAP) published inNature on January 30 this year, which first came under intense scrutiny and severe criticism very soon after their publication, have progressed to their next logical step. Prof. Teruhiko Wakayama from the University of Yamanashi and one of the authors of the studies has openly expressed his eagerness to withdraw the paper from the journal.

The papers by Haruko Obokata from Harvard Medical School and the first author of the papers and others took the world by storm by claiming to have reversed adult mice cells to their pluripotent state by using a very simple process — exposing the cells to mild acidic condition (pH 5.7) for 25 minutes at 37 degree C.
Once reprogrammed, the pluripotent cells (like embryonic stem cells) were capable of becoming any of the adult cells.

In fact, the reprogrammed adult cells were shown to be far superior even to embryonic stem cells. While embryonic stem cells can only contribute to the formation of placental tissue, the STAP cells were found to be capable of contributing to both embryonic and placental tissue formation!

New charge

 A few images published in the paper appear very similar to the ones used in the doctoral thesis of Dr. Obokata has provided evidence of wrongdoing. 

Stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (also known as STAP) is a claimed phenomenon capable of generating pluripotentstem cells by subjecting ordinary cells to certain types of stress, such as the application of a bacterial toxin, submersion in a weak acid, or physical squeezing.^[1][2] This is a radically simpler method of stem cell generation than previously researched methods as it requires neither nuclear transfer nor the introduction of transcription factors.

A new window into an old world

That cosmic inflation may have happened at a higher-than-anticipated energy means physicists have access to the young universe through astronomical data

On March 17, radio astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, announced a remarkable discovery. They found evidence of primordial gravitational waves imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a field of energy pervading the universe.

A confirmation that these waves exist is the validation of a theory called cosmic inflation. It describes the universe’s behaviour less than one-billionth of a second after it was born in the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago, when it witnessed a brief but tremendous growth spurt. The residual energy of the Bang is the CMB, and the effect of gravitational waves on it is like the sonorous clang of a bell (the CMB) that was struck powerfully by an effect of cosmic inflation. Thanks to the announcement, now we know the bell was struck.

Remarkable in other ways

The astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian used a telescope called BICEP2, situated at the South Pole, to make their observations of the CMB. In turn, BICEP2’s readings of the CMB imply that when cosmic inflation occurred about 14 billion years ago, it happened at a tremendous amount of energy of 10{+1}{+6}GeV (GeV is a unit of energy used in particle physics). Astrophysicists didn’t think it would be so high.

Even the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, manages a puny 10{+4}GeV. 

This energy at which inflation has occurred has drawn the attention of physicists studying various issues because here, finally, is a window that allows humankind to naturally study high-energy physics by observing the cosmos. Such a view holds many possibilities, too, from the trivial to the grand.

For example, consider the four naturally occurring fundamental forces: gravitation, strong and weak-nuclear force, and electromagnetic force. Normally, the strong-nuclear, weak-nuclear and electromagnetic forces act at very different energies and distances.

However, as we traverse higher and higher energies, these forces start to behave differently, as they might have in the early universe. This gives physicists probing the fundamental texture of nature an opportunity to explore the forces’ behaviours by studying astronomical data — such as from BICEP2 — instead of relying solely on particle accelerators like the LHC.

 Theories like quantum gravity operate at this level, finding support from frameworks like string theory and loop quantum gravity.

Another perspective on cosmic inflation opens another window. Even though we now know that gravitational waves were sent rippling through the universe by cosmic inflation, we don’t know what caused them. An answer to this question has to come from high-energy physics — a journey that has taken diverse paths over the years.

Consider this: cosmic inflation is an effect associated with quantum field theory, which accommodates the three non-gravitational forces. Gravitational waves are an effect of the theories of relativity, which explain gravity. Because we may now have proof that the two effects are related, we know that quantum mechanics and relativity are also capable of being combined at a fundamental level. This means a theory unifying all the four forces could exist, although that doesn’t mean we’re on the right track.

At present, the Standard Model of particle physics, a paradigm of quantum field theory, is proving to be a mostly valid theory of particle physics, explaining interactions between various fundamental particles. The questions it does not have answers for could be answered by even more comprehensive theories that can use the Standard Model as a springboard to reach for solutions.

Physicists refer to such springboarders as “new physics”— a set of laws and principles capable of answering questions for which “old physics” has no answers; a set of ideas that can make seamless our understanding of nature at different energies.

Supersymmetry

One leading candidate of new physics is a theory called supersymmetry. It is an extension of the Standard Model, especially at higher energies. Finding symptoms of supersymmetry is one of the goals of the LHC, but in over three years of experimentation it has failed. This isn’t the end of the road, however, because supersymmetry holds much promise to solve certain pressing issues in physics which the Standard Model can’t, such as what dark matter is.

Thus, by finding evidence of cosmic inflation at very high energy, radio-astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center have twanged at one strand of a complex web connecting multiple theories. The help physicists have received from such astronomers is significant and will only mount as we look deeper into our skies

Soon, garbage to power planes

Project Aims To Convert Trash Into Drop-In Fuel For Jets By 2017

London: In a world first, British Airways is planning to use garbage to power its flights in an ambitious project which aims to convert municipal waste into 50,000 metric tonnes of jet fuel per year. 
    The project will attempt to convert trash into a drop-in fuel for air-planes by 2017. While the world’s first factory to turn garbage into jet fuel will come up in about three years, waste-fuelled transatlantic flights could come soon after. 
    Turning garbage into bio-fuel generates twice as much energy as incinerating it for trash, British Airways’ head of environment Jonathan Counsell said. “What we get from that is a very pure, high-quality fuel,” said Counsell. According to Counsell, recent life-cycle analyses indicate that the fuel could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95% compared to fossil fuels. 
    The airline has partnered with Solena Fuels to build a trash-to-jet fuel conversion facility at a former oil refinery just east of London, ‘ClimateWire’ reported. 
    The facility will take the waste that cities already collect and turn it into fuel. Once the waste has been cleaned of any hazardous or recyclable materials, it will be combusted in a low-oxygen environment that produces a synthesis gas of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, a process known as gasification. 
    The gas will then be converted to liquid fuel, in a process called Fischer-Tropsch, the report said. 
    Fuelling the London to New York trips with bio-fuel would displace about 2% of the airlines’ consumption at its main hub — Heathrow Airport outside of London. However, British Airways expects to increase its use gradually, in compliance with a United Kingdom aviation industry road map that sets the goal of obtaining 30% of fuels from renewable sources by 2050. AGENCIES

GREEN FLIGHT: British Airways is planning the world’s first factory to turn garbage into jet fuel that is expected to come up in about three years, followed by waste-fuelled transatlantic flights

What ails Indian science?

“Getting funding [for research] is easy in India,” said Dr. Mathai Joseph “because there is no competition here. Money is not scarce [though R&D spending is less than 1 per cent of GDP]. But money comes with the same bureaucratic restrictions that apply to all government expenditure.” Dr. Joseph is a computer scientist and a consultant, and was earlier a senior research scientist at TIFR, Mumbai. For instance, while research students get no funding support to travel abroad to participate in conferences, scientists are constrained by “limited foreign travel.”

These restrictions on foreign travel prevent students and scientists from gaining in terms of networking, exchanging ideas and being exposed to the kind of work being done by their peers in other countries. “Science does not happen like that — by not allowing them to travel abroad,” he said.

The big mistake

But the systematic undermining of scientific enterprise started way back in the mid 1950s. According to an opinion piece published today (April 3) in Nature , (Dr. Joseph is the first author), the Department of Atomic Energy, which was created as a different model, had Homi Bhabha, the head of DAE as a “secretary to the government.” The mistake was repeated when the DAE model was replicated in other institutions — space and biotechnology, to name a few.

“The fact that scientific departments are modelled on the rest of the bureaucracy has turned out to be a big mistake,” Dr. Joseph said. “That’s because bureaucracy is not designed to encourage innovation. DAE and the department of space are the only institutions that undertake developments in-house. Others like the DBT [Department of Biotechnology] do not.” Contrast this with the system followed in the developed countries. For instance, in the case of the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are outside the government bureaucracy.

By being a part of the bureaucracy, even those scientists in India who do remarkable research cannot be rewarded with promotion or pay hike. “If you reward scientific achievement rather than years of service, scientists would be motivated to take up novel scientific challenges,” he noted. Regrettably, the malaise of promotion based on years of service, and not by achievement has spread to institutions at the national level too.

“Indian science has for too long been hamstrung by bureaucratic mentality that values administrative power over scientific achievements,” the paper notes.

It is, however, pertinent to note that the department of space stands out from the rest. Younger people have been put in charge of important programmes, and they have succeeded. “This system is quite old in the department of space,” Dr. Joseph said.

The golden era

These essentially explain why prior to the 1950s important contributions from people like Jagadish Chandra Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujan came from within the country. The pioneering work by these people came before “the machinery of government took over and mismanaged research.”

Another problem is the lack of lateral movement from one institution to another. While collaborating with scientists from other institutions would go a long way in putting to test the usefulness of one’s expertise without actually moving to another institution, one ends up gaining more by moving out. “Vitality grows from being challenged in scientific terms [when one moves from one institution to another],” Dr. Joseph said.

Collaboration

Incidentally, even collaborating with scientists from other institutions is rarely seen in India. Worse, even the funding agencies do not insist on this. Funding is rather provided for collaboration within the institution than across institutions. This is true even in the case of the Nano mission launched in 2007.

According to the authors, the Nano mission has funded 150 individual projects, 11 centres of excellence and six industry-linked projects. “But [the mission] has required no collaboration between institutions,” the paper notes.

“There are very few national frameworks for collaboration,” he said, “working towards a common goal is missing.” Collaboration becomes all the more important as the size of the groups in any area is small in India.

It is true that there is an inherent resistance to collaboration across institutions in other countries as well. “But programmes like ESPRIT [European Strategic Programme on Research in Information Technology] insist on collaboration across institutions and countries for funding,” he said.

According to the paper, one of the four changes that need to be urgently initiated to reinvigorate research is to decouple funding and government control. “Indian science needs public funding, but not government control,” the paper notes. There are numerous examples in other countries and in Europe where such a system has been operating successfully.

The tenure of heads of institutions should also be limited and they should be encouraged to return to active research. “The rotation should be every five years. It’s very hard to do research when you head an institution,” he said, “you can’t do research full time.”

‘Heartbleed bug’ puts web security at risk

Virus In Protocols Used By 75% Of Servers Leaves Millions Vulnerable To Data Theft

Javed Anwer TNN 

    Aserious bug in security protocols used by over 75% web servers has left millions of internet users vulnerable to snooping and data theft. The bug, which was found in OpenSSL protocol has been dubbed Heartbleed because of how it allows “bleeding of data” from a web server. 
    Cyber criminals and hackers can exploit the bug to steal information such as private encryption keys, passwords of users, credit card details that users provide during e-commerce transactions and virtually every other piece of data transmitting on the affected website. They can also capture user data like chat logs for snooping. 
    The risk to private encryption keys is particularly worrisome. “These are the crown jewels… Leaked (private) secret keys allow the attacker to decrypt any past and future traffic to the protected services and to impersonate the service (like a social networking website or an email service) at will,” OpenSSL explained a website set up to inform public about Heartbleed. 
    While large companies like Google and Facebook, which run their own customized security protocols, are probably safe, Yahoo was among the millions of websites that seem to have been affected. Yahoo officials on Tuesday said that they have taken required measures to secure Yahoo servers against Heartbleed. 
    The bug is so serious and widespread that Tor Project, which manages the anonymous (and popular) Tor network, has advised web users to go offline for a while. “If you need strong anonymity or privacy on the internet, you might want to stay away from the internet entirely for the next few days while things settle,” it said in a blog post. 
    Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and one of the top computer security researchers, called the bug catastrophic. “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he said. 
    Though Heartbleed was discovered on April 7, it had existed for more than two years. “This bug has left large amount of private keys and other secrets exposed to the internet. Considering the long exposure, ease of exploitation and attacks leaving no trace this exposure should be taken seriously,” explained the Heartbleed website. 
    After the bug was disclosed publicly, thousands of websites have patched and updated their web servers. But given the nature of the bug, large parts of the internet remain vulnerable. 
    While Heartbleed directly affects web servers, the average web user invariably ends up a victim. In an answer to a question — Am I affected by the bug? — the OpenSSL website notes, “you are likely to be affected either directly or indirectly”. “Your popular social site, your company’s site, commerce site, hobby site, site you install software from or even sites run by your government might be using vulnerable OpenSSL. Many of online services use TLS to both to identify themselves to you and to protect your privacy and transactions,” notes the website.
LURKING DANGER 
WHAT IS HEARTBLEED? It is a two-year-old security bug in OpenSSL protocols used by over 70% websites. It is called Heartbleed because it leads to ‘bleeding of data’ from affected servers 
WHAT IS OPENSSL? 
    OpenSSL is a security protocol 
    built using SSL/TLS encryption. 
    Any website that has “https” or a small green lock ahead of its name uses SSL/TLS encryption. For example when you type your login name and password on your bank’s website and hit enter, it uses a secure channel to transfer your details to the website server. This channel is encrypted by SSL/TLS. OpenSSL is one of the most popular and widely used implementation of SSL/TLS 
HOW HEARTBLEED AFFECTS YOU If the website that you use has been exploited by cyber criminals using Heartbleed, yourprivate data is at risk. In case of a banking website, it could be card and account details. In case of email website, your user name and password is at risk. In case of chat service, your chat logs are vulnerable 
WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT Web servers have to be patched or updated to fix Heartbleed. This is something website administrators will have to do. But as a user you can ask your bank, email provider, web administrator whether their service is affected by the bug or not. Also, if you can change your passwords on various websites, do that

World’s largest swarm of genetically modified mosquitoes released in Brazil

The world’s largest-ever swarm of genetically modified mosquitoes has been released in Brazil to combat infectious disease, according to reports.

Jacobina, a farming town in Bahia, has been plagued for years by dengue fever, a mosquito-borne tropical disease and a leading cause of illness and fatality in Brazil.

According to the Global Post , the newly-hatched Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have been engineered to wipe out their own species, The Independent reported.

Last year, Brazil reported 1.4 million cases of dengue, for which there is no vaccine — the most severe form of the illness, dengue hemorrhagic fever, can lead to shock, coma and death.

The so-called ‘Franken—skeeter’ has been genetically modified in a laboratory with a gene designed to devastate the non-GM Aedes aegypti population and reduce dengue’s spread.

The mosquitoes contain a lethal gene but are kept alive in the laboratory with the help of the antibiotic tetracycline. Once they reach larval stage, the males are separated from the females, which are subsequently destroyed.

Then the males, which don’t bite, are released so they can mate with wild females. Their offspring inherit the lethal gene and then die before they can reproduce because they are not treated with tetracycline.

India to conduct complex interceptor missile test

In another fortnight, India will be conducting one of the most complex interceptor missile tests. For the first time a state-of-the-art interceptor missile at supersonic speed will seek to engage and destroy an incoming target missile at a very high altitude of 120-140 km over the Bay of Bengal.

For the first time, the interceptor missile (PDV) would be seeking to destroy the separating payload of the target missile (a modified PAD) after discriminating between the booster and the payload.

Describing it as a “big challenge,” they said the interceptor’s “kill vehicle,” equipped with a dual seeker, would attack the payload (warhead portion) as it descends towards its intended target. 

The advantage of intercepting an incoming missile at such a high altitude was that the debris would not fall on the ground and there would be no collateral damage.

From detection to interception, the entire exercise would be fully automated and there would be no human intervention. 

The kill vehicle of the interceptor, equipped with an attitude control mechanism, would hurtle towards the target’s missile payload at a speed of 1500 metres per second as it seeks to engage and destroy it.

After some more trials, India plans to deploy a two-tiered Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system to protect important cities from external threats. 

In the first phase, incoming enemy missiles of 2,000-km range are envisaged to be waylaid and destroyed, while those with about 5,000-km range would be tackled by the interceptors in the second phase.

So far, six of the seven interceptor missile tests, carried out by the DRDO, have been successful. While two interceptions were conducted in exo-atmopshere (altitudes between 47 and 80 km) the rest were in endo-atmosphere (below 40 km altitude).

To heat eco-city, Turkey looks to ‘green gold’

Pistachios are already a key ingredient in Turkish baklava, but the country may now have found a new way to exploit the nuts known as “green gold” — by using their shells to heat a new eco-city.

Officials are currently examining plans to build the country’s first ecological city with buildings both private and public heated by burning pistachio shells.

And there can be few better locations for such a project than Gaziantep — the south-eastern region close to the Syrian border which produces thousands of tonnes of the nut every year.

“Gaziantep’s potential in pistachio production is known, as well as its considerable amount of pistachio shells waste,” said Ms. Seda Müftüõglu Güleç, a green building expert for the municipality.

“We are planning to obtain biogas, a kind of renewable energy, from burning pistachio shells,” she said.

“We thought the ecological city could be heated by burning pistachio shells because when you plan such environment-friendly systems, you take a look at natural resources you have,” she said.

“If the region was abundant in wind power, we would utilise wind energy,” she added.

Feasible energy source

The pistachio-heated new city would encompass 3,200 hectares, and house 200,000 people. It would be located 11 kilometres (six miles) from the province’s capital city, also named Gaziantep.

“Imagine it just like a separate city,” Ms. Güleç said.

If the project bears fruit, pistachio shells formerly regarded as waste could become a new form of energy.

Turkey is one of the world’s biggest producers of pistachios, along with Iran, the United States and Syria, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Last year, it exported 6,800 tonnes of the nut, generating approximately $80 million (€57 million) in income, up from 4,010 tonnes and $50 million in 2010, according to the Southeast Anatolia Exporters Union.

Gaziantep alone exported 4,000 tonnes last year, Mr. Mehmet Kahraman, from the union said.

A pilot project first

A pilot project for the new city will run in a small 55-hectare area, before rolling out across the entire city if successful.

The potential of pistachio shells was first uncovered by French environmental engineering company Burgeap which reported last year that the local variety known as Antep was the most feasible source of energy in the region. It said that Antep pistachio shells — with its 19.26 calorific value per kilo — are the most feasible local energy source in the province and that it would be enough to provide heating and cooling for 55 hectares of public buildings.

Burgeap said as much as 60 per cent of the area’s heating could be met from renewable energy resources.

The project is still pending approval from local authorities.

While Ms. Güleç declined to provide a firm timeline, she said that if officials at the municipal level reach an agreement — and if private land owners are convinced — it will be implemented in a “very short period of time.”

 

Brightening Moon to save electricity?

A Sweden-based cosmetics company has proposed a bizarre new method to eliminate the need for streetlights - brighten the surface of the Moon. The idea is to use materials already on the Moon to lighten its surface. The goal is to reflect slightly more sunlight onto Earth, making the night sky brighter, according to the company's thinktank, Foreo Institute.

A brighter night sky would mean less need for streetlights, which could potentially translate into less electricity usage and thus fewer globe warming carbon emissions, it said. "We want to raise public awareness about the project and generate consciousness about the global energy crisis," said Paul Peros, CEO of Foreo. The proposal has a hint of a "marketing scheme" to it, but precisely why the cosmetics company came up with this idea remains unclear, LiveScience reported.

When asked, a company representative told the website that Foreo is an "innovation company" that engages with experts from diverse fields. However, scientists are sceptical about the idea. "Making the Moon brighter is not something I've ever heard of in geoengineering literature," said Ben Kravitz, a postdoctoral researcher in the atmospheric sciences and global change division of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Foreo's claims to have raised $52 million for research and testing and a timeline on the company's website says its first Moon mission is slated for 2020 with new rovers deploying every three years. According to Foreo, only about 0.1% of the Moon's surface would need to be transformed to reach 80% of the "desired brightening effect".

Peros said the company is looking into smoothing over a portion of the Moon's surface to increase reflectivity. "We are looking at the surfaces and composition of the soil and materials on the Moon and how to utilize them," he said. Even if such a mission were successful, it could have side effects. Light at night can disrupt sleep and has been linked to increases in several types of cancer. Foreo says the brightening effect would happen over 30 years, allowing humans time to adjust. agencies